Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is a prolific inventor and is involved in fields like OCR, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech recognition. He did his undergraduate at MIT. In this talk, he emphasized the exponential growth of information technology. I think everyone can see that information technology is growing very fast. Just in the short span of my life so far, my daily life has transitioned from one that is almost devoid of electronic devices to one in which computers, smart phones, tablets etc are indispensable. However, I haven't thought too much about the actual growth speed before this talk. Grasping the concept of exponential growth is almost eye-opening. This really makes me feel very excited because the range of possibilities that technology can achieve is kind of unfathomable. It's exciting to live in this age of the world and I also feel an urgency in my work. I have to work fast, otherwise the work will be outdated very soon.  

Playing videos in Ubuntu

Recently I've been having a problem playing videos in Ubuntu: all I see is a green screen. This happens for Totem Movie Player, mplayer and VLC. So far I fixed the problem in VLC. What I need to do is  to go to Tools > Preferences > Video and choose X11 video output (XCB) under Display Output. Un-checking the "Accelerated video output (Overlay)" works too. Using Xvideo as the output will cause the green screen.

Another useful tool for converting ogv file to high definition mp4 file is Arista Transcoder. You can install it from Ubuntu Software Center.

Also I installed all the libraries for media support mentioned in this post: 3 things to do after installing or upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04. Now I can also play mp4 file in the Chrome browser.

Video and audio conversion

For video conversion, avidemux is a good tool. Today I used it to rotate a mp4 video by 180 degrees. The instructions can be found here.

For audio conversion, soundconverter is good. I used it to convert a wma file to mp3. The instructions can be found here.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Pricinple

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.